(born April 13, 1939, near Castledàwson, County Londonderry, N.Ire.) Irish poet. After studying at Queen's University in Belfast, he became a teacher and lecturer. Appalled by the violence in his native Northern Ireland, he moved to the republic of Ireland in 1972. From the 1980s he taught at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge.
His works, rooted in Northern Irish rural life, evoke historical events and draw on Irish myth, but they also reflect the land's recent troubled decades. His collections include Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), North (1975), The Haw Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1991), The Spirit Level (1996), and District and Circle (2006). Preoccupations (1980) and Finders Keepers (2002) include essays on poetry and poets. He also made a noteworthy translation of Beowulf. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.
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